Lexical Features Structure Features and Rhetorical Devices of English Newspaper Headlines

陈伟创

( 030224101, Class 1, Grade 2003, SFS, SCNU )

Abstract: With the development of mass media, newspaper is one of the major media for us to get information all over the world. Nowadays English newspaper is very popular and read all over Chine. However, many people still have difficulty in understanding English newspaper headlines even for some English majors. This is because English newspaper headlines have their own special features, culture backgrounds and different from the daily English we used in many aspects. This paper will then focus on the lexical, structure features and rhetorical devices of English newspaper headlines, which can help us to have a better understanding when we are reading newspapers. Key words: Newspaper headline, Lexical features, Structure features, Rhetorical devices.

Ⅰ.Introduction Every time we pick up a newspaper, what come into our sight will be lots of news headlines. A headline has become an indispensable part of newspaper. The editor means to attract the reader’s attention through headlines. As a result, news paper headlines are usually specially designed to be short, concise, and informative to convey different kinds of information. We may be confused by the headlines like “Cater’s War on Waste”, “UFO Sighted”, “Smugglers Get Jail and Fines”, “Weekly Mag for Stamp Lovers to Be Launched”, ect. Yet without some knowledge of news headline features, it is not easy for us to read English newspaper. This paper has summarized the study of newspaper development in recent years and presents the lexical features, structure features and rhetorical devices of English newspaper headlines in details.

II. Literature Review The study of English newspaper headlines can date back to 1990s. In the past ten years many scholars in China have carry out many study concerning news headlines and many papers have been published. One of the papers, 《On the Features of English Newspaper Headline》, is written by Zhang Qiong in 2001. That paper covers different features of newspaper headlines but it is not specific enough. This paper will concentrate on three aspects of news headlines, lexical features, structure features and rhetorical devices, which help to some extend make our understanding of newspaper headlines more deeply and specific.

III. Lexical Features of English Newspaper Headlines
Lexical features of English newspaper headlines can mainly include four parts. They are exemplified as follows.

[1] Abbreviation Abbreviation, which is used in a large quantity in English newspaper, means “A shortened form of a word or phrase used chiefly in writing to represent the complete form”. Generally speaking there are 3 kinds of Abbreviations used in the newspaper.

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